


Outside's A Paper Shroud

by FyrMaiden



Category: Glee
Genre: Effeminophobia, Gender Issues, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized effeminophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4711856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt won't even consider playing Hedwig on stage, and Blaine doesn't understand why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outside's A Paper Shroud

**Author's Note:**

> More of a sketch than actual fic. Apologies for some potentially wonky shifts in POV, and ideas that are not maybe as tidy in their execution as they could be.

Kurt laughs, the first time one of their friends mentions it, rolls his eyes and takes another sip of his drink, another mouthful of his salad, and stays quiet until the subject changes again and they move on to their next topic of conversation. He forces the idea out of his head and, when Blaine brings it up later, says nothing once again. Blaine seems to understand that the subject has been tabled indefinitely, and lets it go, kisses his jaw and his neck and takes his hand and leads him to bed instead.

The second time, Kurt doesn’t laugh. He narrows his eyes and shakes his head and says there is no way, no way, that he’s wearing a dress on stage. They’re at brunch with friends, and the subject has, as it always does, rolled back around to who is going to be cast in the touring production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and one of their friends, casting her appraising glance up and down Kurt’s body and taking in his voice and his demeanour, has suggested - again - that Kurt could be a consideration. He’s not laughing anymore. It’s not funny. He’s not wearing a dress on any stage.

Blaine, who knows the intonations of Kurt’s voice and the glassy distance in his eyes, tries changing the subject, asks for more water, and then takes Kurt’s hand under the table and squeezes his fingers. Kurt turns a brittle smile on him, and Blaine leans into him briefly. The conversation stalls for a moment, and then Rachel breaks the silence with a story from her days waitressing, and there’s laughter again. Kurt doesn’t join in, and doesn’t eat any more of his food, and Blaine watches him closely with worried eyes.

The third time, Kurt’s voice is ice when he says this needs to stop. He untucks his napkin and pushes himself away from the table, and Blaine is left to make their excuses as he gathers their phones and jackets and hurries away from the table, catching up to Kurt where he waits on the corner, his mouth a flat line and jaw clenched and Blaine recognises in his face that Kurt is trying not to cry.

‘Hey,’ he says, soft as he draws Kurt away from the middle of the sidewalk, out of the way of prying eyes and out of the flow of pedestrian traffic. ‘Kurt, talk to me, please?’

Kurt shakes his head and closes his eyes, breathes out slowly and then in again, steady and solid. Blaine watches him and tries, mentally, to replay the conversation in his head. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that they haven’t laughed about in private.

Except -

‘Is this about the show?’ Blaine tries, and Kurt’s eyes, when they finally meet his, are scarily empty.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time the Glee club almost performed Rocky Horror?’ he says, and Blaine, who knows the story, shakes his head. Kurt huffs a laugh and takes Blaine’s hand in his own as he turns to continue their walk home. ‘You’re a terrible liar,’ he says, but it’s full of love. ‘They wanted me to play Frank, and I refused. I couldn’t - be out there. Like that.’

‘Understandable,’ Blaine says, ‘But you’re not 15, Kurt. And this isn’t high school.’

Kurt snorts, devoid of humour or intonation, and says, ‘Yeah. Okay.’

The thing is, though, Blaine can’t quite make himself let it go. He doesn’t think about it consciously, and when he does, when the thoughts rise in the darkness and the silence, he pushes them away, reminds himself that Kurt has his reasons. Blaine’s known him since he was a teenager, after all, has been with him through most of the hurts and the aggressions that being himself invoked. He was there when Kurt was named Prom Queen, when he didn’t get the lead in West Side Story because he wasn’t credibly masculine enough to pull off the straight lead. He knows, deep down in his soul, that Kurt has more than enough reasons to push the feminine aside.

But - He knows, in his head, that there are things about the role that are exactly what Kurt was doing in high school. Subversively pushing buttons and defying expectations, demanding the conversation that gender doesn’t stop or start between your legs. Literally no one walks away from Hedwig emasculated by her. He doesn’t say anything, only bottles it away and ignores the persistent itch.

In the back of his mind, though, he can’t help the panic that rises, hot and tight, about how Kurt thinks of him, if Kurt believes he’s somehow less because of how he presents himself, how close to the surface he wears his own heart, and he won’t ask, because it suddenly seems too needy to want that reassurance. He channels his concern into cooking, into being there and around, and only smiles a little too brightly when Kurt stops him and asks what is wrong, reminds him he doesn’t have to do everything, that they’re in this together, which makes Blaine choke back his own gratitude and kiss him a little too firm. In the absence of discussion that Blaine won’t have, and Kurt probably wouldn’t want regardless, he puts his energy into the physical, into sex, because it’s familiar and it works, or usually works, anyway -

It’s Kurt, in the end, who brings it up again. Kurt is standing in their kitchen, half naked in a robe that’s untied and pajama pants that hang enticingly from his hips, making them food. ‘It’s not even like I’m right for it,’ he says, apropos of nothing. It’s been weeks, months perhaps, and Blaine starts and looks up, sleepy and confused.

‘For what?’ he asks, and Kurt deposits an omelette and coffee in front of him and takes a seat of his own across their small table from Blaine.

‘Hedwig,’ Kurt says, as if that’s obvious, as if Blaine should be able to read his thoughts. He’s had over a decade to learn the impossible. Blaine opens his mouth, and Kurt speaks into the silence, says he doesn’t have the fluidity, the raw sexuality that he knows Hedwig needs, points out they’ve both seen it and they both know the truth of that. She’s a lot of things that Kurt isn’t, and isn’t sure he could be, and Blaine - who has the aching muscles and the memory of Not The Boy Next Door, both of which are disagreeing loudly and vehemently with Kurt’s assertion that he can’t sell raw sexuality - snorts derisively and cuts his omelette into small pieces to avoid the argument.

‘What?’ Kurt says, rests his elbows on the table, and Blaine tells him that if he doesn’t eat, he’s going to have a cold omelette, and that would be a waste.

‘We’re not done here,’ Kurt says, pointing a fork at him, and Blaine nods and smiles, and - omelette finished - avoids further conversation with coffee.

It’s later, curled up on their couch with his toes tucked under Kurt’s thigh and the sleeves of an old NYU sweater pulled down over his hands, that Blaine says, ‘You could have it, you know?’ Kurt stares at him, head turned and canted to one side.

‘What?’ he says, and then amends, ‘Could have what?’

‘That raw sexuality,’ Blaine continues, and thinks of the ache in his muscles now and then, of the ways he knows that Kurt can move. Kurt opens his mouth to disagree, and Blaine points out, before Kurt can get a word out, that there’s that video clip on YouTube of him leading the McKinley Titans in a very public rendition of Single Ladies and, at this point, it’s into the hundreds of thousands of views.

‘How many of those are you?’ Kurt deflects, and Blaine turns the corners of his mouth up sadly.

‘You are sexy,’ he says, determinedly, and Kurt leans in and kisses him firmly.

Blaine’s endorsement notwithstanding, there are things that are for Blaine and there are things that are for the rest of the world, and he’s just - not sure he could be that, publicly, not yet. Maybe not ever. He wasn’t sexy at 15. The world reminded him of that constantly. And there are some lessons a body just learns.

It’s not an argument. Or it’s not An Argument, anyway. It’s more of a void that they skirt around, the subject they do not name. Kurt makes his stance clear - he’s not playing a woman, not today, not tomorrow, probably not next year - and Blaine lets it niggle, worry beneath his skin. That one Halloween aside, back when they were kids, and that one time Kurt wore his version of the McQueen armadillo heels that Gaga made famous, Kurt has worked hard to not appear soft, to squash the ways in which people want to feminise him because of what he loves, and who his friends are -

‘It’s not about the fact she’s a woman,’ he says, eventually, slowly, carefully, and Kurt stops what he’s doing, knife poised over a pile of half chopped carrots.

‘Sorry?’ he says, and Blaine repeats himself.

‘It’s not about her being a woman,’ he says. ‘Or, it’s important that she is. It’s part of it. But it’s not - she’s a political prisoner of her own aspirations and dreams. She’s - she was a kid like we were once, you know? She was a young, feminine boy trapped in a place that wasn’t safe for her, and who made a choice she should never have had to to escape, and whether she tells that story in a wig and a slip and a pair of heels isn’t the point. The anger and the frustration and the trauma are the point, and I know you understand that. I just don’t know why you won’t -’

The knife in Kurt’s hand clatters to the bench, the noise stopping Blaine in his tracks. Kurt’s face is pale where he stands, his stare boring through the chopping block and the work top and maybe even the floor. Blaine pushes his chair back and moves to comfort him, but Kurt is moving faster, out of the kitchen and down the corridor and into their bathroom. Blaine reaches the door just in time to hear the bolt slide into place on the other side, and he lets his forehead rest against the door for a moment before heading back and finishing the preparations for dinner.

When Kurt reemerges, his pale skin blotchy and his eyes a little red, Blaine has their dinner in the oven. He looks up from his laptop when Kurt sits quietly on his end of the sofa, his spine ramrod straight, and he says, ‘I’m sorry, Kurt.’ Kurt shakes his head, but doesn’t look at him.

‘You get it’s not about the dress,’ he says, his voice dispassionate. Blaine studies the side of his head, his profile, and reaches for a hand that gets withdrawn. He tries not to let the rejection hurt him. He does, though, understand. It’s not that Kurt won’t wear a dress. It’s that, perhaps, he understands it too much.

The dress is easier to object to.

Blaine doesn’t bring it up again, not deliberately. They do see it one more time, though, and Blaine squeezes Kurt’s hand through it, and Kurt holds him a little too tight on the way home, and Blaine knows that his own softness, his own femininity, isn’t the issue. It’s more to do with Kurt’s fear of vulnerability. All Blaine can be - continue to be - is a place where Kurt is allowed to have rough edges and deep wounds and parts the hurt when they’re prodded.

He still thinks Kurt would look good in that slip and those heels, though.


End file.
